Ray Rice Abuses Wife, Loses Job & Is Suspended Indefinitely

[Ethel mermania]

all nfl contracts have a "morals clause" conduct detrimental to the leagues image is subject to league and team disipline.

I personally find this disturbing because it sets a rather nasty precedent (I newer know how to spell that dam thing). If they are allowed to have morality clauses than everyone is. I am surprised you don't hear more stories about corporations throwing these things in and than summarily firing everyone who does not subscribe to their religion/ideology because it harms their image.

cant discriminate against religion in the us. for other stuff, they do all the time, look at the CEO who had to resign for kicking a dog. and by reisgn i mean either quit or be fired.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post ... ing-a-dog/

[Saint Jade IV]

I find this slightly puzzling. Why would a sports organization have any authority to suspend someone over offenses not relating to the sport in question? It's not like the guy abused his wife on the pitch during a game or something. I mean sure, this is a case for the criminal justice system. But thats a separate thing altogether.

all nfl contracts have a "morals clause" conduct detrimental to the leagues image is subject to league and team disipline.

Shame Adrian Peterson's behaviour is not seen in the same light. He should get the same treatment as Ray Rice. Perhaps worse, since his son was even less capable of defending himself before or after the fact than Janay Rice.

[The Rich Port]

And, uh, what are you basing this on?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbwTMJroTbI

Check 0:08 and 0:24. She hit him twice. Then he hits her back and backs away for her. At which point she had the brilliant idea of pouncing him. It is only then that he delivers the knock-out punch.

The image quality isn't exactly stellar, but it strongly suggests she was extremely aggressive, far more than he was. He even tried to back away, but she pursued him.

It's just that he was one hell of a lot stronger than she was.

Yeah, I'm afraid that's not gonna fly in court.

From what I understand about self-defence, you have to be in immediate danger of being injured. I don't know in what kind of grievous injury Rice could have received from his wife smacking his... Shoulder.

Also, her charging at him... Not threatening enough to knock her the fuck out like he's Mike Tyson going up against Holyfield.

And I think it's very fucking depressing that this appears to be a common relationship: people who hit and punch each other out and then get married.

I'm pretty sure if I'd ever hit any of the girls I've been in relationships with, I'd have been dumped immediately, and vice versa; I take enough shit from my blood relatives, I don't need another person bossing and pushing me around.

[Alancar]

Yeah, I'm afraid that's not gonna fly in court.

From what I understand about self-defence, you have to be in immediate danger of being injured.

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was making.

The point I was making is that this incident was an altercation where the wife initiated the aggression, not a one sided unprovoked assault as most people treat it.

I'm not trying to defend Rice, I'm simply pointing out the wife is not an innocent victim.

I would also argue that if this incident had happened between Rice and a man, a very significant portion, if not the majority, of people would be saying stuff like: "If you are stupid enough to pick a fight with someone who is twice your size, you don't get to complain when you get your ass handed to you"

Hence why I think this is sexist in the sense that it perpetuates the notion that it is ok for a women to hit a man.

[The Black Forrest]

Yeah, I'm afraid that's not gonna fly in court.

From what I understand about self-defence, you have to be in immediate danger of being injured.

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was making.

The point I was making is that this incident was an altercation where the wife initiated the aggression, not a one sided unprovoked assault as most people treat it.

I'm not trying to defend Rice, I'm simply pointing out the wife is not an innocent victim.

Oh FFS. It doesn't matter if she initiated it.

You might have an argument if she was special forces, taught hand to hand or had a serious weapon.

I can see it now. Granny raised her cane at me; I had to knock her out!!!!!

[Haktiva]

I have to wonder if a woman who did the same thing would be subject to the same punishment as Mr. Rice.

Probably not.

[Gauthier]

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was making.

The point I was making is that this incident was an altercation where the wife initiated the aggression, not a one sided unprovoked assault as most people treat it.

I'm not trying to defend Rice, I'm simply pointing out the wife is not an innocent victim.

Oh FFS. It doesn't matter if she initiated it.

You might have an argument if she was special forces, taught hand to hand or had a serious weapon.

I can see it now. Granny raised her cane at me; I had to knock her out!!!!!

And those dentures are lethal, man!

[Ethel mermania]

Sure, but that wasn't the point I was making.

The point I was making is that this incident was an altercation where the wife initiated the aggression, not a one sided unprovoked assault as most people treat it.

I'm not trying to defend Rice, I'm simply pointing out the wife is not an innocent victim.

Oh FFS. It doesn't matter if she initiated it.

You might have an argument if she was special forces, taught hand to hand or had a serious weapon.

I can see it now. Granny raised her cane at me; I had to knock her out!!!!!

it might count as a mitigating circumstance when it comes to sentencing

[Alancar]

Oh FFS. It doesn't matter if she initiated it.

You might have an argument if she was special forces, taught hand to hand or had a serious weapon.

I can see it now. Granny raised her cane at me; I had to knock her out!!!!!

I'm confused as to what your point is.

His actions are not justified as self defence. I said that in my first post on this thread and I said it again in the post you are quoting.

The point however is that it is not ok for you to hit anyone, regardless of how much bigger than you they are. And that bloody needs to be said. She is not an innocent victim, she is an aggressor that received a disproportionate response.

[The Black Forrest]

Oh FFS. It doesn't matter if she initiated it.

You might have an argument if she was special forces, taught hand to hand or had a serious weapon.

I can see it now. Granny raised her cane at me; I had to knock her out!!!!!

I'm confused as to what your point is.

His actions are not justified as self defence. I said that in my first post on this thread and I said it again in the post you are quoting.

The point however is that it is not ok for you to hit anyone, regardless of how much bigger than you they are. And that bloody needs to be said. She is not an innocent victim, she is an aggressor that received a disproportionate response.

You know this almost sounds like "the bitch was asking for it" argument.

It doesn't matter she initiated it. She wasn't a credible threat.

[Tahar Joblis]

I'd agree with you that men do indeed suffer from problems of being disbelieved or perceived as "whimpy" or "unmasculine" if they accuse their partner of domestic violence, and many law enforcement agencies have said more efforts need to be made to look into this, so I would agree woman-on-man domestic violence is an issue and needs to be rigorously addressed. I would disagree with anyone who claimed that it was not a problem.

As for the 85% statistic, I continued searching as you recommended and landed here:

http://www.fjcgeorgetown.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=18

In the above article, the 85% statistic is cited and the source is labelled Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, so I assume this is what you were referring to when you talked about the IPV conference. The BJS has a proven track record and their job is to maintain data and statistics on crime in the United States. I'm not saying the statistic is perfect, but its safe to assume it was subject to a rigorous testing and fact-finding methodology. It does still seem that there is a gender aspect to domestic violence.

Which in turn takes data from the NCVS; which in turn:

(A) Shows rates significantly lower than most behavioral surveys, because
(B) It relies on victims identifying themselves as crime victims in the survey

For these reasons, the NCVS comes to the conclusion that there are barely over 1 million incidents of domestic violence per year, and that 60% of these are reported to the police. What surveys on domestic violence have found, very consistently, is that if you rely on men to count themselves as crime victims, men abused by women will not identify themselves as crime victims, or even as victims of "domestic violence," but if you use behavioral questions - such as asking whether your partner hit, scratched, kicked, bit, etc. you - men start answering "yes" a lot more often.

Yes, the BJS is a professional outfit. It does not, however, render their results immune to methodological issues.

My apologies for not linking to the study in the previous post. I was referring to the only below:

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/134467/1/Content.pdf?accept=1

The study basically analysed the methodology of 13 previous empirical studies attempting to prove gender symmetry in IPV, and the report's conclusion is that the evidence suggests cultural factors and societal perception lead to severe limitations in the reporting of crimes by respondents in all the studies. Machismo and patriarchal ideas play a very important role, somewhere in page 21 it does discuss issues of male-dominated culture and its influence on research into domestic violence. It seems intuitive that in societies and households that still have patriarchal norms and stereotypes, men and women alike are more likely to be normalised to women being hurt by their husbands as 'discipline' or men exercising rightful control, leading to men and women to overreport or underreport either perpetration or victimisation accordingly.

ummary of results of the 13 empirical studies (note that the page I linked to synthesizes far more than 13 empirical studies, and does so far more comprehensively) do not actually support a meta-analytic conclusion of gender asymmetry.

• 6 show gender symmetry to within measurement precision.
• 2 show mixed results, with women measuring significant higher on some specific types of aggressive behavior on one study, and women measuring significantly higher on non-reciprocal violence in the other
• 1 shows mixed results with women measuring higher in violence being "reactive."
• 4 show results with women being primarily victims.

The author makes a lot out of the one study where women are "reactive" and initiating less. I will note that other studies on domestic violence have, in fact, found that women are more likely to escalate or initiate violence, e.g.:

Bland, R., & Orne, H. (1986). Family violence and psychiatric disorder. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 31, 129-137. (In interviews with 1,200 randomly selected Canadians <489 men, 711 women> found that women both engaged in and initiated violence at higher rates than their male partners.)

Capaldi, D. M, Kim, H. K., & Shortt, J. W. (2004). Women's involvement in aggression in young adult romantic relationships. In M. Putallaz and K. L. Bierman (Eds.). Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Among Girls (pp. 223-241). New York: Guildford Press. (A review chapter which reports on data obtained from Oregon Youth Study and Couples Study. Authors conclude that "Young women were observed to initiate physical aggression toward their partners more frequently than were the young men." And "the relative prevalence of frequent physical aggression by women and of injury and fear for men was surprisingly high.")

Goodyear-Smith, F. A. & Laidlaw, T. M. (1999). Aggressive acts and assaults in intimate relationships: Towards an understanding of the literature. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 17, 285-304. (An up to date scholarly analysis of couple violence. Authors report that, “...studies clearly demonstrate that within the general population, women initiate and use violent behaviors against their partners at least as often as men.”

In general, most of the studies I have seen which measure initiation by both men and women come to the conclusion that women initiate violence more often, and this dovetails with the studies showing that women are more likely to engage in non-reciprocated violence. It is actually very difficult to claim that women are more likely to initiate violence when women are substantially more likely to engage in entirely non-reciprocated violence. Women initiating violence often do not seem to expect anything to come of it.

Now, of the four studies cited as support for gender asymmetry:

• One relies on NCVS data (problematic for reasons I already discussed).
• One relies on NVAW data (which has been criticized for the same reasons as the NCVS)
• One relies on a sample of alcoholics (not general population, serious selection problems)
• One relies entirely on interviewing women (and only interviews of women) identified as having been victims and perpetrators of IPV (and also below 200% of the poverty line). This presents very obvious and very serious selection problems, in addition to the serious methodological issues with a gender-asymmetric study design being used to study gender symmetry.

Oddly enough, one of the restrictive criteria the author announces is the use of "matched couple data." You should note that they include it as a restriction for "empirical studies of gender difference in IPV reporting" but not "empirical studies of gender differences in IPV prevalence," and that the four empirical studies presented as supporting gender asymmetry fail to use matched-couple data... in particular, in one case, failing to even collect data from men at all.

What that matched-couple data shows is that men do, in at least some instances, very severely under-report.

Of the studies on IPV reporting that the author cites, two are drawn from cases that have drawn attention of the law (and are therefore nearly worthless for our purposes, being that they are subject to substantial selection bias). All but one of the remainder show that men under-report relative to women, and severely under-report being victimized by women, to the point where women (who under-report their own perpetration by some degree) report inflicting more violence on men than men report receiving.

The remaining one is conducted in Hong Kong; and I'm talking about the modern Western world. The author does go on to note that the consequences are not symmetric, and I agree. If you read enough of the literature, it seems clear that women are roughly twice as likely to get injured, being on average more physically fragile and less physically powerful.

I understand the problem is worse in the developing world due to traditional values there that still promote child marriage or more patriarchal views of stricter gender roles. However, I don't think that means gender and misogyny doesn't play a role in domestic violence in the Western world.

Gender and misandry play a role in domestic violence. And misogyny. And misanthropy. The people who commit heterosexual abuse often have a poor view of either the opposite sex or the entire human race.

To begin with, there is a lot of evidence of a rape culture, sexual objectification and victim-blaming of women in the Western world.

Male victims are more likely to be victim-blamed. Do you know where the term "rape culture" comes from? It originates in a documentary film looking at the widespread acceptance of rape of male victims in prison.

What we see, very consistently, across all kinds of crime, but especially sexual crimes, that female victims receive more sympathetic treatment than male victims. You can say this is due to sexism, and you'd be right; but when you try to pin this on misogyny, it becomes a very poor fit.

Look at the Steubenville rape case and Daisy Coleman rape case where the media and their hometowns came up in defense of the rapists.

The media essentially unanimously condemned the perpetrators in the Steubenville case... even before conviction. This was true in the NYT scoop that brought the case to national attention, the viral campaign online, and the subsequent wall-to-wall cable coverage. Defense of the accused was mostly limited to people who were local and personally knew some of the people involved in the events of that night or the subsequent cover-up.

This also happened in the Duke lacrosse case, where it turned out the accusations were fabricated. Here on NSG, many of us continued to condemn the accused right through to the point that the NC bar filed ethics charges against Nifong... after which those of us (myself included) baying for justice defended our actions by saying that even if the lacrosse team wasn't guilty of rape (which was starting to look increasingly likely), they weren't innocent of wrongdoing.

Or the fact that the Kirsten Gillibrand harrassment in the US can still happen in hallowed elected bodies. Or the fact that people have come up in vigorous defense of Ray Rice, or the slut-shaming that pervaded social media after the Jennifer Lawrence celebrity nude hacking scandal. Or the sexist heckling that pervaded in Annette Bosworth's election run or the Glasgow Union debates. Or look at the Columbia University scandal where students complained of neglect and mishandlement from college campuses when they attempted to report their rape (and this isn't an isolated incident, other college rapes have often gone unpunished or punished with ridiculous penalties like 'expelled after graduation'). Or look at the following articles about sexism in the first world:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10767784/UN-Britains-sexism-more-pervasive-than-any-other-country.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/16/hillary-clinton-julia-gillard-outrageous-sexism
http://www.upworthy.com/rape-culture-is-alive-and-well-in-america-because-of-these-6-things
http://time.com/40110/rape-culture-is-real/

Given that it is widely accepted that in the first world, misogyny and sexism play a fundamental, indispensable role in rape and sexual assault,

I would not say it is "widely accepted" unless we restrict ourselves to working within feminist theory. (In which case misogyny and sexism play a fundamental role in everything.)

The fact is that when we remove the word "rape" and concentrate on behavior, we find that female-on-male sexual coercion at significant rates in "reversed" scenarios, with women engaging in sexual coercion only modestly less than men. Another fact is that gays and lesbians have just as much of a problem with same-sex sexual coercion as straight people do with opposite-sex sexual coercion.

The narrative of blaming misogyny and sexism is vague enough to be coerced to fit any particular scenario, but it does not work very well. The fact is, if rape and sexual assault were fundamentally tied to misogyny and sexism, we wouldn't see lesbians raping each other at rates comparable (in some studies, higher than) straight couples and gay men. This is why some feminists of the 1970s got caught up with lesbian separatism and political lesbianism: They genuinely believed that rape, abuse, etc were due to misogyny and sexism, which meant that a woman-woman relationship would avoid those problems.

But it turns out that conflict is a fundamental consequence of human relationships, and that some men and women do not deal with conflict appropriately.

we should also accept that it plays a role in domestic violence. After all, the dynamics of abuse, the need for control and dominance, all have its roots in rape culture and sexual objectification, the notion that women don't own themselves but are owned by their husbands and that beatings by men are sometimes justified because the women did something that deserved it.

That notion is essentially dead in the modern Western world. The only remotely acceptable excuse in the modern day is she started it, and even that is not accepted nearly as often as he started it. (See, again, that Australian study I pointed to earlier.)

The primary relevance of sexism in the modern Western world to domestic violence is that violence is treated more seriously if the victim is female, and more seriously if the perpetrator is male.

[Batuni]

This is an interesting thread.

Although it leads me to wonder what people make of the Hope Solo case?

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/22/sports/soccer/soccer-star-hope-solo-arrested-in-assault.html?_r=0

Arrested and charged with domestic violence, not dropped by her sponsor, and no suspension whatsoever.

[Gauthier]

Snipped

tl;dr Men are the Real Victims and Women are the Real Criminals.

[The Black Forrest]

Snipped

tl;dr Men are the Real Victims and Women are the Real Criminals.

It's genocide man!

[Ethel mermania]

I'd agree with you that men do indeed suffer from problems of being disbelieved or perceived as "whimpy" or "unmasculine" if they accuse their partner of domestic violence, and many law enforcement agencies have said more efforts need to be made to look into this, so I would agree woman-on-man domestic violence is an issue and needs to be rigorously addressed. I would disagree with anyone who claimed that it was not a problem.

As for the 85% statistic, I continued searching as you recommended and landed here:

http://www.fjcgeorgetown.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=18

In the above article, the 85% statistic is cited and the source is labelled Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, so I assume this is what you were referring to when you talked about the IPV conference. The BJS has a proven track record and their job is to maintain data and statistics on crime in the United States. I'm not saying the statistic is perfect, but its safe to assume it was subject to a rigorous testing and fact-finding methodology. It does still seem that there is a gender aspect to domestic violence.

Which in turn takes data from the NCVS; which in turn:

(A) Shows rates significantly lower than most behavioral surveys, because
(B) It relies on victims identifying themselves as crime victims in the survey

For these reasons, the NCVS comes to the conclusion that there are barely over 1 million incidents of domestic violence per year, and that 60% of these are reported to the police. What surveys on domestic violence have found, very consistently, is that if you rely on men to count themselves as crime victims, men abused by women will not identify themselves as crime victims, or even as victims of "domestic violence," but if you use behavioral questions - such as asking whether your partner hit, scratched, kicked, bit, etc. you - men start answering "yes" a lot more often.

Yes, the BJS is a professional outfit. It does not, however, render their results immune to methodological issues.

My apologies for not linking to the study in the previous post. I was referring to the only below:

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/134467/1/Content.pdf?accept=1

The study basically analysed the methodology of 13 previous empirical studies attempting to prove gender symmetry in IPV, and the report's conclusion is that the evidence suggests cultural factors and societal perception lead to severe limitations in the reporting of crimes by respondents in all the studies. Machismo and patriarchal ideas play a very important role, somewhere in page 21 it does discuss issues of male-dominated culture and its influence on research into domestic violence. It seems intuitive that in societies and households that still have patriarchal norms and stereotypes, men and women alike are more likely to be normalised to women being hurt by their husbands as 'discipline' or men exercising rightful control, leading to men and women to overreport or underreport either perpetration or victimisation accordingly.

ummary of results of the 13 empirical studies (note that the page I linked to synthesizes far more than 13 empirical studies, and does so far more comprehensively) do not actually support a meta-analytic conclusion of gender asymmetry.

• 6 show gender symmetry to within measurement precision.
• 2 show mixed results, with women measuring significant higher on some specific types of aggressive behavior on one study, and women measuring significantly higher on non-reciprocal violence in the other
• 1 shows mixed results with women measuring higher in violence being "reactive."
• 4 show results with women being primarily victims.

The author makes a lot out of the one study where women are "reactive" and initiating less. I will note that other studies on domestic violence have, in fact, found that women are more likely to escalate or initiate violence, e.g.:

Bland, R., & Orne, H. (1986). Family violence and psychiatric disorder. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 31, 129-137. (In interviews with 1,200 randomly selected Canadians <489 men, 711 women> found that women both engaged in and initiated violence at higher rates than their male partners.)

Capaldi, D. M, Kim, H. K., & Shortt, J. W. (2004). Women's involvement in aggression in young adult romantic relationships. In M. Putallaz and K. L. Bierman (Eds.). Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Among Girls (pp. 223-241). New York: Guildford Press. (A review chapter which reports on data obtained from Oregon Youth Study and Couples Study. Authors conclude that "Young women were observed to initiate physical aggression toward their partners more frequently than were the young men." And "the relative prevalence of frequent physical aggression by women and of injury and fear for men was surprisingly high.")

Goodyear-Smith, F. A. & Laidlaw, T. M. (1999). Aggressive acts and assaults in intimate relationships: Towards an understanding of the literature. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 17, 285-304. (An up to date scholarly analysis of couple violence. Authors report that, “...studies clearly demonstrate that within the general population, women initiate and use violent behaviors against their partners at least as often as men.”

In general, most of the studies I have seen which measure initiation by both men and women come to the conclusion that women initiate violence more often, and this dovetails with the studies showing that women are more likely to engage in non-reciprocated violence. It is actually very difficult to claim that women are more likely to initiate violence when women are substantially more likely to engage in entirely non-reciprocated violence. Women initiating violence often do not seem to expect anything to come of it.

Now, of the four studies cited as support for gender asymmetry:

• One relies on NCVS data (problematic for reasons I already discussed).
• One relies on NVAW data (which has been criticized for the same reasons as the NCVS)
• One relies on a sample of alcoholics (not general population, serious selection problems)
• One relies entirely on interviewing women (and only interviews of women) identified as having been victims and perpetrators of IPV (and also below 200% of the poverty line). This presents very obvious and very serious selection problems, in addition to the serious methodological issues with a gender-asymmetric study design being used to study gender symmetry.

Oddly enough, one of the restrictive criteria the author announces is the use of "matched couple data." You should note that they include it as a restriction for "empirical studies of gender difference in IPV reporting" but not "empirical studies of gender differences in IPV prevalence," and that the four empirical studies presented as supporting gender asymmetry fail to use matched-couple data... in particular, in one case, failing to even collect data from men at all.

What that matched-couple data shows is that men do, in at least some instances, very severely under-report.

Of the studies on IPV reporting that the author cites, two are drawn from cases that have drawn attention of the law (and are therefore nearly worthless for our purposes, being that they are subject to substantial selection bias). All but one of the remainder show that men under-report relative to women, and severely under-report being victimized by women, to the point where women (who under-report their own perpetration by some degree) report inflicting more violence on men than men report receiving.

The remaining one is conducted in Hong Kong; and I'm talking about the modern Western world. The author does go on to note that the consequences are not symmetric, and I agree. If you read enough of the literature, it seems clear that women are roughly twice as likely to get injured, being on average more physically fragile and less physically powerful.

I understand the problem is worse in the developing world due to traditional values there that still promote child marriage or more patriarchal views of stricter gender roles. However, I don't think that means gender and misogyny doesn't play a role in domestic violence in the Western world.

Gender and misandry play a role in domestic violence. And misogyny. And misanthropy. The people who commit heterosexual abuse often have a poor view of either the opposite sex or the entire human race.

To begin with, there is a lot of evidence of a rape culture, sexual objectification and victim-blaming of women in the Western world.

Male victims are more likely to be victim-blamed. Do you know where the term "rape culture" comes from? It originates in a documentary film looking at the widespread acceptance of rape of male victims in prison.

What we see, very consistently, across all kinds of crime, but especially sexual crimes, that female victims receive more sympathetic treatment than male victims. You can say this is due to sexism, and you'd be right; but when you try to pin this on misogyny, it becomes a very poor fit.

Look at the Steubenville rape case and Daisy Coleman rape case where the media and their hometowns came up in defense of the rapists.

The media essentially unanimously condemned the perpetrators in the Steubenville case... even before conviction. This was true in the NYT scoop that brought the case to national attention, the viral campaign online, and the subsequent wall-to-wall cable coverage. Defense of the accused was mostly limited to people who were local and personally knew some of the people involved in the events of that night or the subsequent cover-up.

This also happened in the Duke lacrosse case, where it turned out the accusations were fabricated. Here on NSG, many of us continued to condemn the accused right through to the point that the NC bar filed ethics charges against Nifong... after which those of us (myself included) baying for justice defended our actions by saying that even if the lacrosse team wasn't guilty of rape (which was starting to look increasingly likely), they weren't innocent of wrongdoing.

Or the fact that the Kirsten Gillibrand harrassment in the US can still happen in hallowed elected bodies. Or the fact that people have come up in vigorous defense of Ray Rice, or the slut-shaming that pervaded social media after the Jennifer Lawrence celebrity nude hacking scandal. Or the sexist heckling that pervaded in Annette Bosworth's election run or the Glasgow Union debates. Or look at the Columbia University scandal where students complained of neglect and mishandlement from college campuses when they attempted to report their rape (and this isn't an isolated incident, other college rapes have often gone unpunished or punished with ridiculous penalties like 'expelled after graduation'). Or look at the following articles about sexism in the first world:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10767784/UN-Britains-sexism-more-pervasive-than-any-other-country.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/16/hillary-clinton-julia-gillard-outrageous-sexism
http://www.upworthy.com/rape-culture-is-alive-and-well-in-america-because-of-these-6-things
http://time.com/40110/rape-culture-is-real/

Given that it is widely accepted that in the first world, misogyny and sexism play a fundamental, indispensable role in rape and sexual assault,

I would not say it is "widely accepted" unless we restrict ourselves to working within feminist theory. (In which case misogyny and sexism play a fundamental role in everything.)

The fact is that when we remove the word "rape" and concentrate on behavior, we find that female-on-male sexual coercion at significant rates in "reversed" scenarios, with women engaging in sexual coercion only modestly less than men. Another fact is that gays and lesbians have just as much of a problem with same-sex sexual coercion as straight people do with opposite-sex sexual coercion.

The narrative of blaming misogyny and sexism is vague enough to be coerced to fit any particular scenario, but it does not work very well. The fact is, if rape and sexual assault were fundamentally tied to misogyny and sexism, we wouldn't see lesbians raping each other at rates comparable (in some studies, higher than) straight couples and gay men. This is why some feminists of the 1970s got caught up with lesbian separatism and political lesbianism: They genuinely believed that rape, abuse, etc were due to misogyny and sexism, which meant that a woman-woman relationship would avoid those problems.

But it turns out that conflict is a fundamental consequence of human relationships, and that some men and women do not deal with conflict appropriately.

we should also accept that it plays a role in domestic violence. After all, the dynamics of abuse, the need for control and dominance, all have its roots in rape culture and sexual objectification, the notion that women don't own themselves but are owned by their husbands and that beatings by men are sometimes justified because the women did something that deserved it.

That notion is essentially dead in the modern Western world. The only remotely acceptable excuse in the modern day is she started it, and even that is not accepted nearly as often as he started it. (See, again, that Australian study I pointed to earlier.)

The primary relevance of sexism in the modern Western world to domestic violence is that violence is treated more seriously if the victim is female, and more seriously if the perpetrator is male.

ok, but what does any of this have to do with ray decking jayna, and roger goodell being a lying piece of shit?

[The Rich Port]

I'd agree with you that men do indeed suffer from problems of being disbelieved or perceived as "whimpy" or "unmasculine" if they accuse their partner of domestic violence, and many law enforcement agencies have said more efforts need to be made to look into this, so I would agree woman-on-man domestic violence is an issue and needs to be rigorously addressed. I would disagree with anyone who claimed that it was not a problem.

As for the 85% statistic, I continued searching as you recommended and landed here:

http://www.fjcgeorgetown.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=6&Itemid=18

In the above article, the 85% statistic is cited and the source is labelled Bureau of Justice Statistics Crime Data Brief, Intimate Partner Violence, so I assume this is what you were referring to when you talked about the IPV conference. The BJS has a proven track record and their job is to maintain data and statistics on crime in the United States. I'm not saying the statistic is perfect, but its safe to assume it was subject to a rigorous testing and fact-finding methodology. It does still seem that there is a gender aspect to domestic violence.

Which in turn takes data from the NCVS; which in turn:

(A) Shows rates significantly lower than most behavioral surveys, because
(B) It relies on victims identifying themselves as crime victims in the survey

For these reasons, the NCVS comes to the conclusion that there are barely over 1 million incidents of domestic violence per year, and that 60% of these are reported to the police. What surveys on domestic violence have found, very consistently, is that if you rely on men to count themselves as crime victims, men abused by women will not identify themselves as crime victims, or even as victims of "domestic violence," but if you use behavioral questions - such as asking whether your partner hit, scratched, kicked, bit, etc. you - men start answering "yes" a lot more often.

Yes, the BJS is a professional outfit. It does not, however, render their results immune to methodological issues.

My apologies for not linking to the study in the previous post. I was referring to the only below:

http://hub.hku.hk/bitstream/10722/134467/1/Content.pdf?accept=1

The study basically analysed the methodology of 13 previous empirical studies attempting to prove gender symmetry in IPV, and the report's conclusion is that the evidence suggests cultural factors and societal perception lead to severe limitations in the reporting of crimes by respondents in all the studies. Machismo and patriarchal ideas play a very important role, somewhere in page 21 it does discuss issues of male-dominated culture and its influence on research into domestic violence. It seems intuitive that in societies and households that still have patriarchal norms and stereotypes, men and women alike are more likely to be normalised to women being hurt by their husbands as 'discipline' or men exercising rightful control, leading to men and women to overreport or underreport either perpetration or victimisation accordingly.

ummary of results of the 13 empirical studies (note that the page I linked to synthesizes far more than 13 empirical studies, and does so far more comprehensively) do not actually support a meta-analytic conclusion of gender asymmetry.

• 6 show gender symmetry to within measurement precision.
• 2 show mixed results, with women measuring significant higher on some specific types of aggressive behavior on one study, and women measuring significantly higher on non-reciprocal violence in the other
• 1 shows mixed results with women measuring higher in violence being "reactive."
• 4 show results with women being primarily victims.

The author makes a lot out of the one study where women are "reactive" and initiating less. I will note that other studies on domestic violence have, in fact, found that women are more likely to escalate or initiate violence, e.g.:

Bland, R., & Orne, H. (1986). Family violence and psychiatric disorder. Canadian Journal of Psychiatry, 31, 129-137. (In interviews with 1,200 randomly selected Canadians <489 men, 711 women> found that women both engaged in and initiated violence at higher rates than their male partners.)

Capaldi, D. M, Kim, H. K., & Shortt, J. W. (2004). Women's involvement in aggression in young adult romantic relationships. In M. Putallaz and K. L. Bierman (Eds.). Aggression, Antisocial Behavior, and Violence Among Girls (pp. 223-241). New York: Guildford Press. (A review chapter which reports on data obtained from Oregon Youth Study and Couples Study. Authors conclude that "Young women were observed to initiate physical aggression toward their partners more frequently than were the young men." And "the relative prevalence of frequent physical aggression by women and of injury and fear for men was surprisingly high.")

Goodyear-Smith, F. A. & Laidlaw, T. M. (1999). Aggressive acts and assaults in intimate relationships: Towards an understanding of the literature. Behavioral Sciences and the Law, 17, 285-304. (An up to date scholarly analysis of couple violence. Authors report that, “...studies clearly demonstrate that within the general population, women initiate and use violent behaviors against their partners at least as often as men.”

In general, most of the studies I have seen which measure initiation by both men and women come to the conclusion that women initiate violence more often, and this dovetails with the studies showing that women are more likely to engage in non-reciprocated violence. It is actually very difficult to claim that women are more likely to initiate violence when women are substantially more likely to engage in entirely non-reciprocated violence. Women initiating violence often do not seem to expect anything to come of it.

Now, of the four studies cited as support for gender asymmetry:

• One relies on NCVS data (problematic for reasons I already discussed).
• One relies on NVAW data (which has been criticized for the same reasons as the NCVS)
• One relies on a sample of alcoholics (not general population, serious selection problems)
• One relies entirely on interviewing women (and only interviews of women) identified as having been victims and perpetrators of IPV (and also below 200% of the poverty line). This presents very obvious and very serious selection problems, in addition to the serious methodological issues with a gender-asymmetric study design being used to study gender symmetry.

Oddly enough, one of the restrictive criteria the author announces is the use of "matched couple data." You should note that they include it as a restriction for "empirical studies of gender difference in IPV reporting" but not "empirical studies of gender differences in IPV prevalence," and that the four empirical studies presented as supporting gender asymmetry fail to use matched-couple data... in particular, in one case, failing to even collect data from men at all.

What that matched-couple data shows is that men do, in at least some instances, very severely under-report.

Of the studies on IPV reporting that the author cites, two are drawn from cases that have drawn attention of the law (and are therefore nearly worthless for our purposes, being that they are subject to substantial selection bias). All but one of the remainder show that men under-report relative to women, and severely under-report being victimized by women, to the point where women (who under-report their own perpetration by some degree) report inflicting more violence on men than men report receiving.

The remaining one is conducted in Hong Kong; and I'm talking about the modern Western world. The author does go on to note that the consequences are not symmetric, and I agree. If you read enough of the literature, it seems clear that women are roughly twice as likely to get injured, being on average more physically fragile and less physically powerful.

I understand the problem is worse in the developing world due to traditional values there that still promote child marriage or more patriarchal views of stricter gender roles. However, I don't think that means gender and misogyny doesn't play a role in domestic violence in the Western world.

Gender and misandry play a role in domestic violence. And misogyny. And misanthropy. The people who commit heterosexual abuse often have a poor view of either the opposite sex or the entire human race.

To begin with, there is a lot of evidence of a rape culture, sexual objectification and victim-blaming of women in the Western world.

Male victims are more likely to be victim-blamed. Do you know where the term "rape culture" comes from? It originates in a documentary film looking at the widespread acceptance of rape of male victims in prison.

What we see, very consistently, across all kinds of crime, but especially sexual crimes, that female victims receive more sympathetic treatment than male victims. You can say this is due to sexism, and you'd be right; but when you try to pin this on misogyny, it becomes a very poor fit.

Look at the Steubenville rape case and Daisy Coleman rape case where the media and their hometowns came up in defense of the rapists.

The media essentially unanimously condemned the perpetrators in the Steubenville case... even before conviction. This was true in the NYT scoop that brought the case to national attention, the viral campaign online, and the subsequent wall-to-wall cable coverage. Defense of the accused was mostly limited to people who were local and personally knew some of the people involved in the events of that night or the subsequent cover-up.

This also happened in the Duke lacrosse case, where it turned out the accusations were fabricated. Here on NSG, many of us continued to condemn the accused right through to the point that the NC bar filed ethics charges against Nifong... after which those of us (myself included) baying for justice defended our actions by saying that even if the lacrosse team wasn't guilty of rape (which was starting to look increasingly likely), they weren't innocent of wrongdoing.

Or the fact that the Kirsten Gillibrand harrassment in the US can still happen in hallowed elected bodies. Or the fact that people have come up in vigorous defense of Ray Rice, or the slut-shaming that pervaded social media after the Jennifer Lawrence celebrity nude hacking scandal. Or the sexist heckling that pervaded in Annette Bosworth's election run or the Glasgow Union debates. Or look at the Columbia University scandal where students complained of neglect and mishandlement from college campuses when they attempted to report their rape (and this isn't an isolated incident, other college rapes have often gone unpunished or punished with ridiculous penalties like 'expelled after graduation'). Or look at the following articles about sexism in the first world:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-politics/10767784/UN-Britains-sexism-more-pervasive-than-any-other-country.html
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/16/hillary-clinton-julia-gillard-outrageous-sexism
http://www.upworthy.com/rape-culture-is-alive-and-well-in-america-because-of-these-6-things
http://time.com/40110/rape-culture-is-real/

Given that it is widely accepted that in the first world, misogyny and sexism play a fundamental, indispensable role in rape and sexual assault,

I would not say it is "widely accepted" unless we restrict ourselves to working within feminist theory. (In which case misogyny and sexism play a fundamental role in everything.)

The fact is that when we remove the word "rape" and concentrate on behavior, we find that female-on-male sexual coercion at significant rates in "reversed" scenarios, with women engaging in sexual coercion only modestly less than men. Another fact is that gays and lesbians have just as much of a problem with same-sex sexual coercion as straight people do with opposite-sex sexual coercion.

The narrative of blaming misogyny and sexism is vague enough to be coerced to fit any particular scenario, but it does not work very well. The fact is, if rape and sexual assault were fundamentally tied to misogyny and sexism, we wouldn't see lesbians raping each other at rates comparable (in some studies, higher than) straight couples and gay men. This is why some feminists of the 1970s got caught up with lesbian separatism and political lesbianism: They genuinely believed that rape, abuse, etc were due to misogyny and sexism, which meant that a woman-woman relationship would avoid those problems.

But it turns out that conflict is a fundamental consequence of human relationships, and that some men and women do not deal with conflict appropriately.

we should also accept that it plays a role in domestic violence. After all, the dynamics of abuse, the need for control and dominance, all have its roots in rape culture and sexual objectification, the notion that women don't own themselves but are owned by their husbands and that beatings by men are sometimes justified because the women did something that deserved it.

That notion is essentially dead in the modern Western world. The only remotely acceptable excuse in the modern day is she started it, and even that is not accepted nearly as often as he started it. (See, again, that Australian study I pointed to earlier.)

The primary relevance of sexism in the modern Western world to domestic violence is that violence is treated more seriously if the victim is female, and more seriously if the perpetrator is male.

So, you're a Male Rights Activist.

Ah, but seriously, thank you for bringing attention to that.

I'm sure that Rice is just as abused, but... How can we remedy this, then?

Rice either dumps his abusive wife, works out his problems with, or ignores that shit and continues to live in a terrible relationship, as he has apparently been doing for years now.

If it's nigh impossible to get regular women and men to face their problems, imagine how goddamn fucking impossible it's going to be get a wealthy, cocky football player to face his problems.

I think him being suspended could be positive for him... Or he could be very stubborn and stay the course. I hope it's not the latter...

[Tahar Joblis]

ok, but what does any of this have to do with ray decking jayna, and roger goodell being a lying piece of shit?

What do early 19th century Swedish-Russian relations have to do with Putin invading Russia?

Well, it came up naturally in the course of discussion. And in the course of this discussion, someone was pontificating loudly and wrongly about female-on-male violence not being an issue and domestic violence being a women's problem, throwing out an at-best-misleading figure in their own support.

So, since someone was wrong on the internet...

[The Fascist American Empire]

The guy deserves it and more. End of story.

[The Black Forrest]

ok, but what does any of this have to do with ray decking jayna, and roger goodell being a lying piece of shit?

What do early 19th century Swedish-Russian relations have to do with Putin invading Russia?

Well, it came up naturally in the course of discussion. And in the course of this discussion, someone was pontificating loudly and wrongly about female-on-male violence not being an issue and domestic violence being a women's problem, throwing out an at-best-misleading figure in their own support.

So, since someone was wrong on the internet...

Oh I get it now. Women are out to get you.

[Batuni]

What do early 19th century Swedish-Russian relations have to do with Putin invading Russia?

Well, it came up naturally in the course of discussion. And in the course of this discussion, someone was pontificating loudly and wrongly about female-on-male violence not being an issue and domestic violence being a women's problem, throwing out an at-best-misleading figure in their own support.

So, since someone was wrong on the internet...

Oh I get it now. Women are out to get you.

Huh. Sounds more like he's saying men and women are equally prone to violence.

[The Fascist American Empire]

Oh I get it now. Women are out to get you.

Huh. Sounds more like he's saying men and women are equally prone to violence.

I'm just speaking from personal experience here, but I tend to think women are more violent. Hence why I'm afraid of them.

[The Black Forrest]

Oh I get it now. Women are out to get you.

Huh. Sounds more like he's saying men and women are equally prone to violence.

Not really. He basically argues men are getting mistreated more and the bias of groups, the media, police and society grossly underestimates the truth.

It's a pet topic of his and he appears and repeats it every time there is a violence and women thread.

[Tahar Joblis]

So, you're a Male Rights Activist.

Ah, but seriously, thank you for bringing attention to that.

I'm sure that Rice is just as abused, but... How can we remedy this, then?

Rice either dumps his abusive wife, works out his problems with, or ignores that shit and continues to live in a terrible relationship, as he has apparently been doing for years now.

If it's nigh impossible to get regular women and men to face their problems, imagine how goddamn fucking impossible it's going to be get a wealthy, cocky football player to face his problems.

I think him being suspended could be positive for him... Or he could be very stubborn and stay the course. I hope it's not the latter...

I think going into counseling before getting married to his fiancee could, in fact, be more instructive than being demonized by the media nine months after the original incident.

All the fuss here is not about the court system. The courts came, saw, Ray Rice apologized very much and agreed to go through a counseling program, and the courts decided that he seemed sincere about it and decided to give him a chance to shape up before slamming him with serious consequences. He got a better lawyer than most people, of course, but nobody seems to give a shit about the state of the public defender's office compared to private attorneys and the complexity of case law that allows for two sets of laws for rich and poor, and some people in a DV case convince the courts they're sincere about shaping up without a pricey lawyer, so that's of limited particular relevance.

The fuss here is about the NFL, and whether or not the NFL should toss Ray Rice out on his butt. It's a delayed reaction that has nothing to do with any concern over the particulars of Ray Rice and his wife (who is quite loudly telling people to butt out and is not happy about the suspension or the negative publicity). It's all about the image of the NFL - and that, I think, is true for the main part of all "sides" of the discussion about Ray Rice.

Some people really want to believe in a relationship between football and domestic violence. Others are really big fans of the game and don't want football smeared in any way. But it's not really about Ray Rice or Ray Rice facing consequences. It's about the NFL, institutions, power, and all kinds of bullshit.

Which is why I wasn't interested in commenting on the case in particular, and only hopped in to correct wrongful generalizations. Because I don't really care about the NFL, and I only care about Ray Rice and his wife about as much about any other random person who I hear about in the news. I hope that they have a happy and entirely non-violent marriage from here on out; I know that's what they both claim to want, and I'm not a horrible enough person to be hoping for bad things to happen to random strangers.

[Alancar]

You know this almost sounds like "the bitch was asking for it" argument.

It doesn't matter she initiated it. She wasn't a credible threat.

Of course it matters. There is a world of difference between an unprovoked assault and a disproportionate response to an aggression. Her not being a credible threat only matters in the sense that it doesn't justify Rice's actions in terms of self-defence.

If I sound like I'm saying the bitch deserved it, you sound as if you think it is totally ok for a women to hit a man.

[Ethel mermania]

So, you're a Male Rights Activist.

Ah, but seriously, thank you for bringing attention to that.

I'm sure that Rice is just as abused, but... How can we remedy this, then?

Rice either dumps his abusive wife, works out his problems with, or ignores that shit and continues to live in a terrible relationship, as he has apparently been doing for years now.

If it's nigh impossible to get regular women and men to face their problems, imagine how goddamn fucking impossible it's going to be get a wealthy, cocky football player to face his problems.

I think him being suspended could be positive for him... Or he could be very stubborn and stay the course. I hope it's not the latter...

I think going into counseling before getting married to his fiancee could, in fact, be more instructive than being demonized by the media nine months after the original incident.

All the fuss here is not about the court system. The courts came, saw, Ray Rice apologized very much and agreed to go through a counseling program, and the courts decided that he seemed sincere about it and decided to give him a chance to shape up before slamming him with serious consequences. He got a better lawyer than most people, of course, but nobody seems to give a shit about the state of the public defender's office compared to private attorneys and the complexity of case law that allows for two sets of laws for rich and poor, and some people in a DV case convince the courts they're sincere about shaping up without a pricey lawyer, so that's of limited particular relevance.

The fuss here is about the NFL, and whether or not the NFL should toss Ray Rice out on his butt. It's a delayed reaction that has nothing to do with any concern over the particulars of Ray Rice and his wife (who is quite loudly telling people to butt out and is not happy about the suspension or the negative publicity). It's all about the image of the NFL - and that, I think, is true for the main part of all "sides" of the discussion about Ray Rice.

Some people really want to believe in a relationship between football and domestic violence. Others are really big fans of the game and don't want football smeared in any way. But it's not really about Ray Rice or Ray Rice facing consequences. It's about the NFL, institutions, power, and all kinds of bullshit.

Which is why I wasn't interested in commenting on the case in particular, and only hopped in to correct wrongful generalizations. Because I don't really care about the NFL, and I only care about Ray Rice and his wife about as much about any other random person who I hear about in the news. I hope that they have a happy and entirely non-violent marriage from here on out; I know that's what they both claim to want, and I'm not a horrible enough person to be hoping for bad things to happen to random strangers.

the hyporcacy and the out and out lying by the NFL, is my interest here. the court system is reponsible for doling out justice to mr. rice.